~ fifthRifle is home to two military construction bots who downloaded some illicit creative writing sub-routines and now write comics when their oppressors don't expect them to do onerous tasks like work and stuff…

fiveQuestions II Michael Carroll !!

(Yeah, I know I’m still working on finishing all of One, but here’s Two anyway…)

The wonderful Michael Carroll has been kind enough to answer our five questions.

Michael has become the go-to-guy for Dredd in the last year or so. Obviously Wagner is still the driver to the series, but whereas often the stories in between are normally unable to really move the character/world forward, Michael has been doing this regularly. Interestingly Rob Williams (who just happens to be in fiveQuestions I) noted this in his blog, and Rob is also moving Dredd forward in the current Titan story.

Back to Michael: I’ve just finished his Dredd Year One novel ‘The Cold Light of Day’ – highly recommended. We met Michael at Bristol last year, and we talked about this even though it was some way from publication. Both his novel and Baby Jays happened to share the same problem: how do you write a ‘big’ enough story for a young judge, even Dredd, without a big senior Judge riding in and taking the case off your hands? We went down the simple ‘no one else realises what’s happening’ route, whereas Michael I remember saying wanted to isolate Dredd. Now I naively took that to mean he’d get cut off in the undercity or in a dust zone, but Michael came up with something much better. Go read it…after you read the interview.

It’s also worth highlighting Michael’s website, michaelowencarroll.com, as well listing all Michael’s novels (22!), and each comic issue, it also includes his 3D art, cover designs and some nifty software that includes name generators, fake word generators, and a whole host of Dredd-universe badge generators – see below!

Go read the interview, really interesting answers, and boy does this guy work hard!